Coding Monkey

Getting a job: Tips and tricks.

2011-01-17T17:28:00.004Z

Here are my top tips for getting a job (or a contract).

Your CV needs to be excellent, not a pile of crap that looks like a 12 year old wrote it. If you can't figure it out, stop now and give up because you don't deserve to be a professional software developer.

Try to target companies you actually want to work for. Google them, do your homework, read some blog entries, check google maps, basically stalk them on the internet for a bit. This knowledge will help at interview and you can use bits to help you write a good covering letter.

Use agencies as a last resort (you probably will use them but try direct approaches too). Try the direct approach, rigning companies up, asking friends, using LinkedIn, etc, first.

Think of every nasty question a potential employer asked you and make sure you have a damn good answer.

Act like you actually want the job. You'd be suprised at the number of people I haven't hired, simply because they didn't seem to care.

Don't claim you have knowledge of something you don't but on the other hand you can (and sometimes should) 'talk up' your skills a bit but don't flat out lie. Sadly, a lot of employers are too stupid to realise that people can pick things up on the job quickly and are too quick to dismiss someone because 'they don't have the right skills'. How many jobs have you honestly started with all the skills you needed to do it? If you answered more than zero, your last job was proably as a cleaner.

If you genuinely don't have any skills in certain areas that the job requires, don't let that put you off, be honest in your application. Honesty counts for a lot and you might be suprised. I got a job once with a smaller company on the strength of my experience, dispite not knowing their primary programing language.

If you do use agencies (and in IT, you almost certainly will) then you need to be carefull. Tell them only what they need to know, which is:
- You skills and levels of competancy.
- Where you've worked and when (if asked).
- Your temporary contact details (disposable mobile phone number, temporary email address - see below).

Never give the following to anyone other than an employer:
- Your address and house/mobile phone number.
- Your personal documents like passports, etc (or even coppies).
- Coppies of your qualifications.
- A list of places you've applied to (will just be used for them to send more CVs to).
- Names of people (i.e. individuals) you've worked with (or even worse, for) - if you do, expect them to be called and harassed.
- Money.
- Your time, in any great quantity (agents sometimes like to treat you like an office temp and ask for a face to face - just tell them you're bussy).
- References! See above - will just be used for marketing/sales.

I usually buy a cheap 'pay as you go' mobile and open a temporary gmail account which I use solely for job hunting because some agencies, are SO FUCKING STUPID that they will keep ringing you YEARS after you've stopped looking for work, solely based on a misguided search hit on their crappy software. When this happens, you can dump the phone. The agencies that I actually find useful (of which there are few) get my real contact details when (and only when) they get me a job.

Never sign anything an agent gives you until you have a job and even then - read through carefully. Try not to sign anything which would put you at a dissadvantage, like exclusivity clauses.

Finally, try to get references in writing, get a personal email address (because people change companies) and get an agreement with the referee that you can reuse them for job interviews. That way, you can just photocopy the reference and turn up on the day with it to hand over to the employer (not the agent). This goes down very well because companies are often way too busy to chase references. I once had a truly awesome reference but didn't take a copy of it, fell out with the HR woman who had the only remaining copy and she destroyed it out of spite (shortly before she was sacked), which was rather inconvenient at the time - but hey, lesson learnt!

Dysfunctional Companies

2010-07-20T08:02:00.003+01:00

Way back when I has relocating from the South coast to the crappy middle of England, I was job hunting and landed an interview at a less than impressive company selling widgets used by the water industry. Back then I was feeling pretty desperate but not so desperate that I wanted to shell out £90 in petrol for the sake of wasting my time if they didn't like me at the interview so I asked the agent for a telephone interview as a first step.

They could have just said no, instead they said 'tell him if he wants the job he should turn up or else forget about it'. Not a good first impression, is it?

Like a fool I decided to go to the interview anyway. I was joined in the interview by the bitchy HR/Marketing type (there's one in every crappy start-up), who had a chip on her shoulder against men, 'nerds' and it seems anyone with the balls to ask for a telephone interview.

To say she gave me a grilling would be putting it mildly. She was rude, obnoxious, made derogatory remarks about my appearance and asked if I was a hacker. The director was an ass too. I'm actually quite proud of the way I handled it though, I remained calm, smiled and answered every question politely and courteously.

I got home and told my family 'no way would I want to work with a bitch like that, forget it'. The agent rang me up and I told him the same thing. Then the agent rang me back and said 'you've been offered the job'. I immediately told him where they could stick it. He explained that the lady 'just had a thing against nerds, and so that's why she gave you a hard time'. I explained that that was completely dysfunctional: if she had problems getting on with her colleges because they answered back to her when she was obnoxious and she doesn't like that, she should hire a doormat, which I was not. I would probably have slapped the bitch if she talked to me like that on the job. Interviews are different, you play it cool and see whats on offer.

Eventually he talked me back into it and the grounds that this 'second meeting' (they told me) was 'just to meet the team' - this was to be an opportunity to meet and greet the team and find out who I'd be working with and what projects I'd be working on. When large amounts of money are involved I usually hear people out, so I went. I had nothing to loose.

I was promptly grilled by the technical team. Three little boy-nerds, who were the most obnoxious bunch of little shits you'd ever have the displeasure to work with. The penny dropped. I looked at the face of my manager-to-be which seemed to be saying 'help me out here, I can't handle these teenagers'.

'This is the first we've heard about it', they said. Another bad sign.

I was starting to notice a pattern here: A company that didn't trust or respect it's developers, developers who didn't trust or respect their management. Little to no inter-department communication. Alarm bells starting ringing in my head. This was another Dysfunctional company.

My agent rang me that night to tell me that I now 'definitely had the job'. So I guess I only sort of had it before, right? You lying sack of...

There was, I explained to him, not enough fucking money in the world!

The moral of this story is whilst playing hard-ball with your candidates might sift out the wheat from the chaff to a degree, being inflexible, having an attitude and piss poor communication will show your potential candidates that this isn't the place to be. It's unprofessional and makes your company look about as attractive as an 18th century mill.

What the hell is wrong with Asian spammers?

2010-06-22T22:57:00.002+01:00

Seriously, do you guys have nothing better to do that to try and pimp me Viagra and get me to visit your porn sites by spamming my comments inbox? Do you think I want to see Chinese girls puking in to each other mouths or the latest anime tentacle rape video?

Hey wait... looks like I've got an email from Egggg.com - oh, better enter my account details and 'word of passage' - what's that... egg.com.someshitholein.tk? Yeah that sounds about right...

I mean, Are you earning a living doing this shit (posting comments on a blog with about 0.5 readers and about 1 article every decade) because if you are, I'm almost impressed.

Almost.

/Disables comments

See you next decade suckers.

Cleaning out private data from Google

2009-07-16T10:32:00.002+01:00

About a year ago I landed what I thought was a good job in a very small web development company, the role wasn't what I expected, the people were total dicks and not surprisingly I left under a cloud. Every now and then, like most people, I type names into google to see what pops up, mostly for me it tends to be lots of random actors, muggers, sports people and random teenagers with myspace pages. So the last thing I wanted to find when I googled my own name and hit the link to 'results from my country only' was a big grinning photo of moi at number 1, sat under the name of my old nemesis.

Why? Because I did not want to put this company on my CV, because they fired me. Now I could have come clean and explained it to any future employer with ease but the fact is, the world isn't perfect and people are prejudiced - I fully expected to get to the interview stage if I left it in. So of course, I left it out. Now I know that a lot of employers will google peoples name to find out information about you before the interview. This very company I got fired from embarrassed a candidate applying for the secretary's role by talking about the erm... 'artistic photographs' of her on her facebook page (that gives you an idea of the kind of dicks they were). Privacy is dead and companies have no morals.

So what to do about sorting this mess out? Well, firstly I got the old boss to remove the content by emailing him and politely suggesting that it doesn't benefit either of us (tip: avoid being confrontational at this stage). He saw things my way and removed it. The next step was to remove google's cache of the image and search results that linked to my name by using this tool:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

It's easy enough to remove if the content has already been removed and is 404-ed or the content has changed. It takes a couple of weeks or so sometimes. Once you've done google, I suggest checking yahoo and possibly MSN (but I didn't seem to have a problem with these).

However, this is only the start of the quest to regain your privacy. Sites like 123people.co.uk seem to cache google searches and not only that, they search a bewildering array of sites that you'd completely taken for granted. For instance, a search for my name hit my Amazon wishlist and told you were I lived and what my girlfriends name was, fairly harmless but still more than I want known by just anyone. Needless to say I changed my 'unique facts' to something short and simple that only family would understand. Even if you removed the content from google, some of the content on this search site can stick around for MONTHS! I hate sites like these, they're about as sleazy as you can get - only a stalker thinks that a site like this is cool.

You might also want to check the Wayback machine (which keeps old copies of websites) and make sure that this hasn't grabbed your offending page. It's a little more than most employers would do to search this but it doesn't hurt to be thorough.

So if information does leak out onto the net, it's not the end of the world but it can be very time consuming and difficult (but not impossible) to remove.

Why I allways build my own PCs

2007-07-25T18:20:00.000+01:00

We recently bought a hand-full of DELL PCs for a development project at work that I'm managing and boy are they slow.

I know DELL gets bad press because they're pretty non-upgradable unless you buy the 'DELL-variety' of card you're looking for but that didn't bother me. What concerned me was the fact that my 1.5 Ghz PC was checking out code from the CVS server in seconds, whereas my colleagues took about half an hour on their 'super-fast' shiny new DELLs (2-3 Ghz I think).

Turns out, DELL install all these n00b-filters like McCrappy virus scanner and the Google processor-hog/search toolbar. That means that whenever you run a shell command it has to virus-scan the .exe file (even though it's the same damn one you ran several milliseconds ago) and each file you add or remove has to be (presumably) indexed by the Google desktop software. I never run anti-virus scanners in the background because most of them are pretty dumb and just kill performance.

Scanning through the program list looking for other stuff I could remove, there was all sorts of crap that nobody in their right mind would want installed on a laptop - why the hell does DELL think people want their 3Ghz PC to run like a 486?

This is why I buy the parts and install my own O/S and apps myself - I'm not paying for someone to 'dumb-down' my PC with stupid features that I don't need, save that crap for AOL users.

Damn... it's been a while

2007-06-08T19:56:00.000+01:00

No, the monkey isn't dead. Just really, really bussy for the last year or so.

New job, new girl, new town...

...and I forgot my password(s) (damn, I'm such a n00b).

I don't have a whole lot of free time right now - so much is going on in my new job as a contractor, life has really changed (mostly for the better). I now make over twice as much money as I did in my last job - confirming my opinion that contractors are paid properly and full-time employees are just slaves to the system.

Anyway, I'll post again soon.

Insult JC all you want, just don't mention Mohamed!

2006-04-14T12:01:00.000+01:00

The other night, a South Park episode (cartoon wars II) was censored from showing Mohamed (even though they've done this before in the episode called 'super friends' - see above), just because of recent events surrounding the Danish cartoons. They gave in to terror, so I guess the terrorists have won this round.

I did a little looking around and read some of the far-right Muslim sites reaction to the cartoons and I have to say, I've never read such arrogant, self-righteous crap in all my life -and I've read Rush Limbaugh. Just who the FUCK do these people think they are to impose their religious beliefs and laws on the rest of the world? They threaten us with economic sanctions, violence and terrorism all over some stupid cartoons -and people wonder why the Muslim faith is getting a bad reputation?

I took a look at the cartoons and whilst I didn't find them funny, I didn't think they were actually that insulting, I wouldn't be linking to them if I wasn't doing so out of solidarity to all the people who've been harassed, imprisoned or killed over this issue. Clearly though, a lot of Muslims don't have any sense of humour. So, all because a minority of joy-less, pathetic little children got their delicate sensibilities hurt, the rest of the world gets told what they can and can't say. Well, fuck that.

Here you go.
You can also see some here
here's one from 1827. You see, there's nothing new about drawing offensive cartoons - funny how it's suddenly become such a big issue for them isn't it?

It's comming right for us!

2006-03-14T09:58:00.000Z

Creepy...

Swimming snake robot - hack a day.

F***tard of the week

2006-02-24T11:52:00.000Z

Boing Boing: UK anti-piracy officer assures Firefox she'll catch the pirates who copy it: "A Trading Standards officer in a town in the UK contacted the Mozilla foundation to assure it that she'd caught the icky pirates who were copying Firefox without permission."

God must love stupid people. He makes so many of them.

SONY's guerrilla graffiti ad campaign

2005-12-05T13:59:00.000Z

Secondary Screening: November 2005 Archives: "Not content with simply knowingly infecting its customers' computers with security-hole inducing spyware, Sony is now sponsoring a 'guerrilla' graffiti ad campaign to promote the PSP"

You're s***ing me, right?

It's like they're trying to be evil.

Sony's illegal DRM move

2005-12-03T01:24:00.000Z

Mark, Sysinternals Blog: "At that point I knew conclusively that the rootkit and its associated files were related to the First 4 Internet DRM software Sony ships on its CDs. Not happy having underhanded and sloppily written software on my system I looked for a way to uninstall it. However, I didn’t find any reference to it in the Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs list, nor did I find any uninstall utility or directions on the CD or on First 4 Internet’s site. I checked the EULA and saw no mention of the fact that I was agreeing to have software put on my system that I couldn't uninstall. Now I was mad."

Here's a list of the laws SONY are breaking, in my opinion:

The computer misuse Act 1990:
It an offence to make "unauthorised access to computer material"
It is an offence to make "unauthorised modification of computer material".

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy".
England signed up to the human right act in the EU parliament, recently.

SONY are facing legal action for this allready: bbc

Here's a link to what's been happening this month to SONY's share price: here.

See SONY, this is what happens when you spy on people and compromise their systems with your buggy, illegal, intrusive DRM spyware.

I want to see someone at SONY go to jail for this. They shouldn't be able to buy their way out of it, damn them. How many hackers have been sent to prison for far less than this?

Nuclear Missiles left on default!

2005-11-07T09:13:00.000Z

"For seventeen years, during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War, the code remained all zeros, and was even printed in each silo’s launch checklist for all to see. The codes remained this way up until 1977" read more.

Makes you feel safe doesn't it?

Just goes to show how even the most sophisticated security in the world won't guard you against plain old human stupidity.

Robot Chicken on Google Video

2005-10-25T14:31:00.000+01:00

Google video "offers viewers a way to see material from archived TV programs, educational videos, personal productions [and] will search the closed captioning and text descriptions of all the videos in our archive for relevant results."

In other news today, Voltron got served.

Daaaaaamn!

Some other good clips from 'Robot Chicken' (Seth Green's new show):
(1)
(2)

Update: compeltely unrelated, but too damn funny to leave out, it's the Halo 2 version of the a55h013 song! Enjoy.

Using wikipedia as a technical referance guide

2005-09-30T16:26:00.000+01:00

Wikipedia is probably one of the most popular and accurate wikis about anything and everything out there - sort of like the 'hitchhikers guide to the galaxy' but it's also got some good technical definitions in there, often including links to other sites where you can get related software and tools. For example, here's a page on internet proxies. Quite a nice summary of all the different types/uses of internet proxies, I thought.

This included a link to this handy page which tells you what proxy you're behind. This is useful if you're at work and you want to know your external IP address and whether your proxy is an anonymous proxy or not.

The reason I went there, is I'm thinking of setting up my own anonmyous proxy at home, that I can connect to to hide my browsing traffic because I'm not sure I trust the squares at work and I disslike the idea of them being able to see my personal stuff going over their network (so what if it's your network? It's my data!). If I get my backside in gear and get it done, I'll do a quick how-to post about it later.

Radio shows about hacking

2005-09-30T08:36:00.000+01:00

DDP HackRadio

Lots of shows about hacking and hacking-related topics. Well worth a look!

F***ing with telemarketers

2005-09-10T22:13:00.000+01:00

For a while now, I've been mulling over the idea of using my spare old 56k modem for somthing -maybe a voicemail or recorded message to anoy telemarketers on my lan-line- but then I found the mother of all telemarketer-anoying projects...

The telecrapper 2000!

Share and enjoy!

found via hack a day

Webcams on default

2005-09-05T23:12:00.000+01:00

This is so cool:

The register: web cams open to all

hackaday article

Read, try, have fun but please, don't be an a$$-hat with this.

Sadly my searches for nudist beaches have come up empty handed :(

Scientology is as evil as it is stupid

2005-09-02T17:38:00.000+01:00

Saun Kenedy often goes off on a rant on rant radio about this but here's another good summary I found:

YAFM!

The Time article here: "Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses as a religion but really is a ruthless global scam -- and aiming for the mainstream"

So... why is this still legal, exactly?

Yet, speaking out against it might soon be illegal in Britain. The new act they're working on would make it an offence to 'incite religious hatred' (interpret that how you will). So for instance, when I saw one of these idiots on the street giving out 'free personality tests' and I yelled over 'killed anyone recently?', that probably counted. So sue me. I think people should hate scientology - it's an EVIL CULT.

In this day and age we're just too damn PC to fight back. Pathetic really.

The Zotob worm

2005-08-17T08:37:00.000+01:00

Scary stuff....

InformationWeek : "...rather than attack as a network worm that requires no user interaction, it's a mass-mailed piece of malware posing as an image file attached to an e-mail message. Zotob.c uses such subject headings as 'Warning!' or 'Important' to get the naive to view the message and open the file attachment."

I wasn't too impressed with Microsoft's page about the worm, they just said it installs 'malicious software' and spreads (see here. Just what is malicious? Pop-up messages asking me to buy pills, changing my windows background to the weight-lifter picture or formatting my hard-disc? A little more information would be nice.

CNN just says 'Symptoms include the repeated shutdown and rebooting of a computer.'

I wonder how long it will be before some idiot make a virus like this which is deadly to PCs running windows -that really does format your disc or flash your BIOS with garbage after infecting as many PCs as possible.

A patch isn't much consolation after you've lost all the files on your HD or had your BIOS flashed. How about a little prevention rather than retro-active patching eh, Bill?

(found via Slashdot).

Would recoding email have stopped 9/11?

2005-08-05T15:10:00.000+01:00

No.

Terrorists wouldn't be stupid enough to use these communication mediums without some sort of protection like encryption which would be cracked after the attacks (if at all). No, the only thing this would be good for is spying on your own, looking for 'the trouble makers', figuring out when protests are going to occur and blocking them, etc. The next big step to an Orwellian state.

Just what are we fighting for anyway if we have to give up all our freedoms and rights until we win a war on terror (that will never end)?

"The attacks on London are an attack on human rights. The protection of those human rights matters most when governments and societies face times of crisis. The worst possible response would be to jeopardise those carefully wrought rights by a panic-inspired response. A mass surveillance response to terror would result in a resounding success for the perpetrators of these attacks: a fundamental undermining of our most fundamental values."

Please take time to sign the petition above, against the new proposal to 'keep all telephone and internet traffic data of all 450 million Europeans'.

Fighting the 419-ers

2005-08-01T12:26:00.000+01:00

Advance fee fraud, often also known as the Nigerian money transfer fraud, Nigerian scam or 419 scam

Ah Nigerian scammers, how they make me laugh....

'Dear Sir, I have a huge sum of money to invest... blah...blah...blah... [implausible situation]....blah...[ridiculous request]....blah....give you lots of money if you agree to [insert bait here].... yours in Jesus, [made up English-sounding name]".

What cracks me up more is the folks who decide to play with them.....

Artists against 419 presents: The Lad Vampire

419 eater

Classic.

Classic mistakes software companies make

2005-07-29T14:14:00.000+01:00

1. Contracting out all 'green-field' development to 'off-shore' companies because they're cheap and then using in-house staff to support and maintain the systems, resulting in the end product costing twice as much in the long run because 'cheap' doesn't mean 'quality'.

2. Not giving out at least inflationary-level pay rises or bonuses to reward hard work

3. Promoting staff to the level of incompetence.

4. Having sales and marketing people have any say in technical decisions of any kind, like for instance delivery dates.

5. Having programmers answer the phones, do technical support, deal with customers, etc. Think: cost efficiency. Every time you distract a programmer, you're loosing money.

6. Thinking that an annual performance review should be an opportunity to real off a list of anonymous criticisms and complaints against a staff member instead of dealing with the issues as and when they occur.

7. Starting work without a specification.

8. Arguing with technical staff about how long something will take.

9. Getting angry about when people turn up to work late, after they've been working all hours of the night to fix your crappy systems. Never piss off a coding monkey before they've had their coffee, they might just rip your arms off.

10. Not training your staff, keeping them doing 'what they're good at'. Stagnation results in boredom and apathy.

My company has done pretty much all of the above. I know I'm not alone.

Interface crimes against humanity

2005-07-29T11:17:00.000+01:00

Anyone who makes a web site consisting of the following interface atrocities needs to be shot:

1. Tonnes of flash 3d graphics that grind most PCs to a screaming holt and make the interfaces virtually unusable due to processor lag. Flash: just say no.
2. Obnoxious, vomit-inducing flashing red on green poker adverts, which i always block or nuke.
3. Pop-ups. Ahhhhg the devil, the devil!
4. Spy-ware or other anti-privacy features. If you need to know you need to ask.
5. Sites that try to dissable all the features of your keyboard and browser (such as the context menu, refresh, back, etc). So dumb and so pointless!
6. Terrible spelling.
7. Terrible grammar.
8. Ringtones adverts! Ahhg! The devil (again)!
9. Fonts so small an ant would struggle to read them.
10. My favorite: 'I.E. 5.0'-only sites. Over 75 million people have downloaded firefox. Isn't it about time you catered for them rather than the lowest common denominator?

Web designers: read a book on usability before you design a public service, or else me and my posse of hard-pipe-hitting monkey usability vigilanties will come knocking on your door and get medieval on your ass. (*)

(*) May not actually be true but you should do it anyway.

Foot-printing tool

2005-06-24T11:01:00.000+01:00

Netcraft: "What's that site running?" (top left of page).

Neat little tool I found via BinRev. Tells you what software a web server is using and has lots of other interesting links in there, IP addresses, addresses, server versions (!) and such.

Check it out, I could be wrong but it looks like NTL.com is using a vulnerable version of MS IIS (5.0). If so, it just goes to show what massive n00bs they are (and anyone that's had the pleasure of dealing with NTL customer services knows that allready).

My toaster looks sexier than the XBox 360

2005-06-06T12:37:00.000+01:00

What a naf colour and a crappy design. Also, I'm not impressed with Microsoft's attitude when it comes to it's existing customers:

(Wikipedia): "J Allard stated, 'Xbox 360 will be backward-compatible with top-selling Xbox games'. The ambiguous statement has many media outlets believing that Microsoft may pick and choose certain games. Steve Ballmer in an interview with Engadget has stated that they will concentrate on making sure the best selling titles, such as Halo and Halo 2, are compatible, and by engineering. Michael Brundage, a Microsoft software engineer, says on his site about the current challenge to develop an emulator, granting more reliable and solid compatibility."

I can't see how they're going to make Halo backwards compatible when the new controller doesn't seem to have the black and white buttons used for switching grenades and using the team communicator.

This looks like a poorly thought out marketing gimmick with very little in the way of technical innovation and rational design. Ok, so you've stuck a faster processor in the box and made it a little smaller - so what?

Typical microsoft: when a product works, release a new version at greater cost and stop supporting the older one.

To come: X-treme marketing shots of my toaster.

Caffeine withdrawal

2005-05-19T19:07:00.000+01:00

So I gave up tea and coffee - indefinitely - because I was getting the black shakes (amongst other things) and being knackered at home after work is no fun. The first thing I noticed was 4 days of headaches in the afternoons. So I did a little research on the effects of caffeine withdrawal:

Coffee and Caffeine's Frequently Asked Questions: "What are the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal? Regular caffeine consumption reduces sensitivity to caffeine. When caffeine intake is reduced, the body becomes oversensitive to adenosine. In response to this [oversensitivity], blood pressure drops dramatically, causing an excess of blood in the head (though not necessarily on the brain), leading to a headache. This headache, well known among coffee drinkers, usually lasts from one to five days, and can be alleviated with analgesics such as aspirin. It is also alleviated with caffeine intake (in fact several analgesics contain caffeine dosages). Often, people who are reducing caffeine intake report being irritable, unable to work, nervous, restless, and feeling sleepy, as well as having a headache. In extreme cases, nausea and vomiting has also been reported."

Holy crap, anyone would think you were giving up crack!

So what about decaf - is that safe? It depends... sort of. It still contains caffeine (in small doses) and unless it's water filtered rather than using methylene chloride (which is a suspected carcinogenic) then maybe it's not so safe.

Strange which drugs are legal isn't it?

Food that kills you

2005-05-18T14:16:00.000+01:00

The utter crap we put into the food chain these days....

Aspartame (Nutrasweet) Toxicity Information Center: "Toxicity Effects of Aspartame Use"

I'd heard that the artificial sweeteners in 'diet' drinks were bad for you... but holy crap! Check out some of the highlights from the side effects list:

weight gain
diarrhea
hypertension (high blood pressure)
brain cancer (Pre-approval studies in animals)
death!

Lovely. Right... that's it, no more diet coke for me. In fact, I think I'll quit caffeine too....

"[caffeine] abuse results in symptoms... which include agitation, disorientation and a syndrome which may be mistaken for anxiety/neurosis. It is a habit-forming drug"

"Caffeine particularly has a profound effect on the central nervous system, but it also affects, to a lesser degree the heart muscle, gastric secretion and diuresis."

"The post stimulation "let down" with caffeine results in fatigue and lethargy and the constant stimulation caused by chronic caffeine dosing could be disastrous" - Yeah, that's me baby!

SOURCE here

Also, if you haven't already seen it, go buy/rent/steal this film now: Supersize me! To summarise: junk food kills you slowly, don't eat that s***!

And people wonder why they look and feel like crap?

Labour, Episode III: return of the dictator!

2005-05-06T09:50:00.000+01:00

So that's it. The end of the UK elections, Labour won. The unwashed Sun 'newspaper'-reading masses have spoken. You wanted your dictator to stay, you got him.

It seems that the majority of UK voters are happy with pensioners paying taxes they can't afford, failing health and education systems, houses we can't afford and sending our soldiers off to die for the sake of making a quick buck for the oil industry in the name of 'national security'.

Looking on the bright side, the Lib Dems got the best result they've got in decades. Maybe one day they'll bring sense to the government.

Just 60% of the country actually exercised their right to vote. That's pitiful! Think of all the people that fought and died in World War II - that fought for our freedom, our right to decide how we're governed and who by - and you decide you can't even be bothered to get off your fat asses to post a vote? Maybe you should leave this country then and go live in North Korea.

We're watching you Tony, you grinning f***.

Micro$oft ph34r-dowz and it's hidden shares

2005-04-29T17:36:00.000+01:00

Try this: open a folder on your desktop and in the address bar, type in the ip address of another machine you have, like so:

\\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\C$

It will ask you for a username and password. Type in the username and password for that machine.

Bang! Instant access to that machines root directory. So, if you do a brute force attack you can probably get root on most PCs this way in a relatively short space of time for most machines. Or maybe you'll just lock up their account, preventing them from using it until the administrator unlocks it - either way,you don't want this to happen to your PC!

This 'handy' little feature is deliberately installed by M$ by default and on their wonderfully helpfull website they state:

"Hidden administrative shares that are created by the computer (such as ADMIN$ and C$) can be deleted, but the computer re-creates them after you stop and restart the Server"

So how do you get rid of these blatantly dangerous shares?

A regedit hack seems like the only option.[*1]

But that only gets rid of all but one of your standard shares. IPC$ stays. IPC$ is used for 'Interprocess Communication' (used for server to server comms). See here, here and here why this is bad - most of these article talk about NT, but 2000 and XP were built on top of that and when in doubt - assume the worst.

How do we get rid of this ****ing thing? Goto services and dissable the server service. Also, follow the hints and tips in this article [*2] to dissable netbios over ip (and various other good practices).

Well, hopefully that's made my PC a little more secure until next week when I find another gaping hole in window's so-called security.

You suck Bill.

[*1] There may be certain bits of software that rely on these shares, so it's possible you might one day need to re-insate them temporarily. My advice: if the software relys on that crap, ditch it and get some decent alternative!

[*] Many thanks to John Cesta of server automation tools for providing this list.

Telemarketers P0Wn3D!

2005-04-28T16:55:00.000+01:00

Amercians have the 'do not call list'. In the UK we now have the TPS (Telephone Preferancing Service). What this means:

"Under Government legislation introduced on 1st May 1999 and replaced on 11th December 2003 by the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, it is unlawful to make unsolicited direct marketing calls to individuals who have indicated that they do not want to receive such calls."

The other day I got yet another call from an 'independant orange headset retailer' - I told them I don't even have an Orange phone anymore and I'm allredy registered with the TPS - so what they're doing is illegal. The guy tuts and goes 'whatever' and the f***er hangs up on me! So, naturally I complained to the TPS and now they're could be facing a 5k fine. Suck on that 'independant Orange phone sepcialists'! How do you like them apples?

They're also providing a similar service for mail, although I don't think there's any laws passed about junkmail just yet - but it could be on the cards. Think of all the trees and CDs that could be saved if AOL was unable to send unsolicited coffee coasters (signup CDs) to everyone by post.

How can these credit card companies keep a straight face when they show those 'identity theft' adverts when they mass-mail pre-approved credit card application forms to random addresses? S***, half the time it's for someone who no longer lives a that address. Personally, I allways shred the application then post it using the business reply envelope, taped to a brick and all the other junk mail I've recieved and then post it back to them.

If no idiots actually replied to this s***, then companies wouldn't stoop to these crappy tactics.

Network Security Tools

2005-04-21T10:53:00.000+01:00

Pretty extensive list full of some very usefull tools:

Top 75 Network Security Tools

War driving with a difference

2005-04-13T09:31:00.000+01:00

Wireless keyboard security issues.

I wonder how long it will be before someone captures somebody's password this way? How hard can it be - just open a text editor, rig a wireless keyboard reciever up to your laptop and sit within 100 meters of someones PC for a while?

Think I'll stick with my boring old wired keyboard (that doesn't broadcast my internet banking password), thanks!

What your IP address or domain name tells people about you

2005-04-08T00:12:00.000+01:00

Be aware that you're not completely anonymous on the Internet. A good rule of thumb is, never do anything on the net that you wouldn't have the balls to do in real life.

You (or rather your ISP) get addresses from an RIR. You can find a list of them here. These sites always provide a 'who is' link somewhere which allows you to search for an ip address and gives you registration information.

For instance, go here and type in '66.249.87.104'. You'll see that this range (66.249.64.0 - 66.249.95.255) is goggle's but look what else you've got, their address and what looks like their telephone number for technical support. This sort of information is very useful to social engineers because it often gives the company web site, administrator name and email and telephone number.

If someone does a portscan on my network, my firewall will tell me. I can get their IP address, from my firewall logs or via DOS's netstat command (which shows who's connected to the PC). Odds are it won't list your phone number and address in the 'who is' search results, unless you're a large business but it will tell me who your ISP is. The IP address, together with your ISP gives me some clues about your location.

It might be possible to social engineer your name and/or address from an ISP by just ringing them up but it might be easier just to attempt to break into one of your machines, either the IP address you spotted, or one in the range given to you by your ISP (which I expect are almost always contiguous). I can also do a trace-route to that IP address to find out the IP of your router/firewall and begin foot-printing that to see if I can break in. Once I'm in to your network, I'd be looking for documents with your address on them. This is definitely not legal and I don't suggest anyone tries it - I wouldn't!

Incidentally, you shouldn't really ring up to report any old script kiddy attack though, use email if you're sure its worth it and not just background traffic or some AOL user's viruses looking for other vulnerable machines. If you know for sure that someone's trying to hack you and it's ongoing, ring up their ISP and get them to give them a smacking instead.

Sometimes people conceal their IP address with proxies and/or fake it when port-scanning to one of the reserved ip addresses (so they can't even be followed back to the proxy) but this is something for another article.

Web site name registrations (domain name registrations) tend to offer even more information. These registrations tell the DNS servers (Domain name servers) all over the world what IP address to map to what web site.

It's always best to register your domain privately especially if it might offend people (so your domain registration company keeps your details hidden - except from Big Brother of course). Certain domain hosting companies will do this for you, while others don't seem to care and list your full details for any 'who is' search! Type in a few web sites to the search box on say, this domain registration site and click on the 'who is' bit and you'll see.

Queue Jay and Silent Bob to print the authors details out, come around to their house and get medieval on their a$$!

Try here for more 'who is' search tools.

Party policies summary

2005-04-05T11:36:00.000+01:00

politics

There's a useful page on the BBC news site to summarise party polices.

I've read through this and it's helped me make my decision about who to vote for in the next UK election. Some of the things here made me laugh though:

Labour:
"Stand by Iraq war - even if weapons intelligence was wrong, Saddam flouted UN resolutions"
"university top-up fees up to £3,000, with grants for poorest students"

Ha! Flouting UN resolutions is an excuse for war is it? Then we'd better invade America because all Bush ever does is flout resolutions! Idiots. Good luck getting the student vote Tony, telling them that they need to pay 3k a year.

Why the hell do the conservatives want to 'oppose postal voting'? - w**kers. I hope that those fascist bastards don't get in. I'd vote Labour if I thought they weren't just a more efficient version of the Conservative party instead of actually being socialists like they claimed to be. Besides, I don't want that grinning git Tony to get in again and let us be ruled by proxy from America for the next 5 years.

I'm quite impressed by some of the ideas that the Lib Dems have come up with though:
"Replace council tax with a local income tax"
"Raise stamp duty threshold to £150,000 to help first-time buyers."
"50% tax rate on earnings over £100,000 a year"
"Replace fuel tax/VED with national road user charging"
"no GM crops without strict controls"
"written Constitution"
"want only judges to imprison terror suspects"

I especially like the idea of scrapping council tax and replacing it with local income tax. When you run the rat race all your life, surely after you retire and stop earning money you shouldn't have to pay tax on your home - that's just plain f***ing wrong.

The biggest (and most convincing) argument against the Lib Dems I've heard to date is that it will simply cost us too much but I think the 50% tax on the rich should sort that out. What's the alternative? Labour and Conservative parties have been f***ing us over for the past three decades and like typical British people, we keep on taking it.

Anti-spam email account

2005-04-04T12:40:00.000+01:00

Will Hack For Food! - Free Temporary Email Accounts

Handy tool for when you need to hand out an email address that you only want to work for a short while (until you've recieved a website account activation email, for instance). Later on the account just vanishes, so you don't have to worry about spam.

Provided by StankDawg at BinRev.

Why spend money on schools, police or hospitals when you can spend it on insecure web services?

2005-03-13T14:29:00.000Z

I recently got a letter from the council, saying they've set up a web site to access your council tax details - presumably to cut the cost of their staff answering simple enquiries. Sounds like a good idea in theory, until you remember who you're dealing with.

They gave me a password by post. They told me my account number was on my bills. The password was a f***ing 6 digit numeric code! It looks like everyone in town must have got one of these letters and I'm guessing each one of them has their own easily-crackable 6 digit password. When I got around to reading the damn thing, I logged on in a panic and changed it but I wonder how many other people would actually be bothered?

What's to stop me (if I where so inclined) using a brute force attack to access somebody's account details? Of course, I'd hide this attack using proxies and maybe space it out over a period of time to hide the traffic boost - but what's the likelihood of the council being competant enough to be checking their logs for attacks anyway?. Alright, I'd need the account number - the easiest way to do that is probably just to ring the council, pretend to be the target and just ask for it! There are other ways of course - read Kevin Mitnick's 'The art of deception' if you're interested.

From this attack, I've gained the following information:

Their name, address, council tax account number, the complete details of their council tax payments and perhaps whether or not they live alone (if they claim the single occupant's discount).

Then unless their telephone number is X-Directory (not listed) -maybe even if it is- I could find out their telephone number and social engineer my way to their bank account details, like so...

Social Engineer: 'Hello Mr/Mrs X, I'm Bob from the local council, you're account no. 5687458743 right?'
Victim: 'Erm... yeah. right.' (would you even check?)
SE: 'Great, we're having some computer problems right now and the engineers are repairing some damaged tax records, mind if I just double check that we've got our records straight for your account?'
Victim: 'Yeah, ok, if it's quick.'
SE: 'Great, thanks, shouldn't take long. First, can you just confirm your address.. is it [reads out full address]'
V: 'Yeah'
SE: 'right, that's a band B property?'
V: 'Yes'
SE: 'Ok, so you made the following payments on this date right....[lists recent payments]'
V: 'Sounds about right'
SE: 'great, thanks, oh... and can you just confirm your bank account and sort-code payment details please?'
...

Now I have your personal details, your martial status, your phone number and your bank account details. Scared yet? Wait until I phone you back three months later when you've forgotten the sound of my voice claiming to be 'Fred' from your bank who's having difficulty with our 'on-line banking service' and needs your current bank password so they can log in and 'reset it' (empty it into my Swiss bank account).

Banks loose millions of pounds a year from social engineering and identity theft and it's all thanks in part to incompetent idiots like the local council. Nice work, idiots. It's good to see that my annual council-mugging of £683 a year is well spent! I mean, why spend that money on the schools, police or hospitals when you can spend it on insecure web services?

Related: hacking soc. eng. security.

Star Wars Episode 3

2005-03-11T09:56:00.000Z

The Star Wars Episode 3 Trailer is now available for download at Torrent Reactor.

It's going to be a PG-13! This one looks a lot more like it's going to be a lot darker like 'The Empire strikes back' rather than the sad puppet show that was episode 1 - lets hope this doesn't suck as much a** as that did. From the looks of it though, this is going to be pretty good.

found at Slashdot.

So you're on TV - nobody cares!

2005-03-03T17:01:00.000Z

There's been an alarming increase of 'reality' shows on TV over the past couple of years (although I'm not quite sure how being locked in a room full of ugly lesbians and loud-mouthed scouse-t***s can be classed as reality: unless you are exceptionally unlucky). I can't understand why.

Also, there's all these magazines like 'Heat' advertised on TV, over and over again. Telling us who's sleeping with who, what they're wearing, their latest hair style and which designer made their handbag, etc -riveting stuff like that. Just once I'd like the 'Heat' advert to tell it like it really is:

Idiot Girl: [teases co-wokers about having magazine that they don't]
Co-worker: I'm sorry, I think you're confusing me with someone who gives a f***.
Idiot Girl: Oh... [puts mag in the bin and gets back to over-paid data-entry job].

If you ever flip through these mags as I'll admit I've done occasionally while I'm in the dentist's waiting room- you'll notice they're mostly just full of pictures of celebrities attending events.

Seriously, who gives a f***? Why the hell should I care what someone's wearing/doing/f***ing just because their ugly face has been on TV? What's with all the ex-soap/reality TV types releasing records and/or fitness videos? Here's some free advice to annoying attention-whore celebrities (like Jade from Big Brother): if you look like a pig and you're more annoying than the crazy frog ring-tone, stay at home.

Interesting technical projects

2005-02-13T21:11:00.000Z

Guerrilla.net is an interesting project site I found via 'hack a day' about a bunch of people aiming to set up global, wireless, secure internet, for free. To "ensure that the free flow of information is not obstructed, captured, analyzed, modified, or logged".

I'm totally for this, I think in the past few years there's been an alarmingly rising rate of internet censorship and spying. Anyway... they've got some interesting links to alternative power sources on their site (to power the nodes in their wireless network). I particularly found this article on home fuel cells interesting: homefuelcells.pdf

I saw the idea of hydrogen fuel cells being used to generate power on tv about 7 years ago - looks like they've really moved on now and there are now viable home generators being developed. Hopefully in a couple of years time we'll be able to buy these units to fit in our homes and never have to pay a single penny to the greedy electric company again! All you need is water - amazing. The other really cool thing about hyrdogen power cells is that they're totally environmentally friendly unlike other power stations which contribute to global warming.

If only the American government would plough as much money into research into alternative fuel sources like this than it did invading other countries - we'd have half the pollution we do today. Imagine a world where all the cars run on water.

Hack a day's got lots of other cool links on it - check it out - like this guy who took high-altitude weather balloon and attached a Linux box, webcam, GPS, parachute and long distance wireless network (amongst other things) to take some awesome pictures. Cool.

More Gates bulls***.

2005-02-07T22:10:00.000Z

I was doing some research on Linux at www.linux.org and came across this link to a comment by Bill -f*** the customers- Gates:

Gates: 'Linux makes interoperability harder' - silicon.com

Ok, in English: "Interoperability, n. : (computer science) the ability to exchange and use information (usually in a large heterogeneous network made up of several local area networks)".

Bill is actually criticising Linux for not being good at enabling the exchange of data between different systems? Am I missing something here? Talk about flaming hypocrisy!

Yeah, there may be a few areas where Linux still can't handle the crazy sh** Microsoft has created, that's because Microsoft never f***ing sticks to standards - even it's own standards sometimes! - but for the most part, Linux is actually really good at coping with data from other systems - look at OpenOffice!

Remember the browser wars of the late 90s? Microsoft ignored the HTML standard and bastardised it so that many web pages would only be viewable in IE and not Netscape they also bundled their browser with their OS to force out the competition (doesn't sound so bad until you realise you can never uninstall the f***ing thing -even today). How is that promoting 'interoperability' if you exclude web sites from being viewable in other browsers?

Remember Sun taking Microsoft to court for bundling an implementation of Java with it's OS which (deliberately) didn't match the Sun specifications for Java in a pathetic attempt to burry the technology? That's pretty non-interoperable right there - bitch.

This is pure and blatant scare mongering by Microsoft aimed at managers who don't know any better. It's a sign of the times - they're getting desperate - with good reason. Fire fox is here to stay and more and more people are waking up to the fact that it's the only way to surf the net. I mean, who the hell wants ActiveX components compromising their system?

Microsoft actively strive to be incompatible with everyone else - it's their M.O. How else can they maintain their monopolistic hold on the market?

Haven't you got enough money yet Bill?

Keep trying to throw mud at Linux you sad little man.

Check out how they tried to sue some 17 year old kid called Mike Rowe for creating a web site called www.MikeRoweSoft.com. They obviously failed because the address still takes you to his site. Priceless.

Ch-Ch--Check it out

2005-01-26T09:57:00.000Z

MilkandCookies - Beastie Boys

Ah, these guy's videos crack me up. Love the 'intergalactic' one. Takes me back to my youth when the charts weren't just entirely comprised of tallentless jail-bait teen bands with ugly hair and fashion-victim clothes.

What qualifies you to be an IT recruitment agent?

2005-01-21T15:11:00.000Z

If I had a pound for every time an IT recruitment agent has wasted my time, I'd have enough money to afford a deposit on a small flat in Surrey. These guys are complete f***tards. They're basically sales people with f***-all knowledge about what they're selling. Sales people are usually scum but these guys could teach the average sales person a thing or two about slime.

I'm not happy with my job so I'm looking for work. Like most IT people, I have to register with free job-search sites - which means I'll get every cowboy and his clue-less cousin ringing me up at work on my mobile and spamming my inbox.

The junk email I can cope with because I have a separate account just for that and when this is all over and I'm happily employed elsewhere I will ditch my mobile number and get a new one (with the added incentive that I'll avoid being rung up my project manager - who thinks my mobile is his own personal technical support line). What irritates the crap out of me is the time-wasting phone calls.

After I've left my open-plan office to find somewhere private to talk, I usually find the agent wants to sell me the job for about 15 minutes while i patiently wait for them to let me have a word in edge-ways. My questions then are usually: where is it, what does it pay and what are the entry requirements? I swear 90% of the time the agent hasn't even considered that these are things that are the most important aspects of any job! They're too bussy trying to make a sale rather than find a match. Half the time they'll either not know the answer to my questions -but they'll lie and pretend they do!- the other half they'll know it but lie to make it sound more attractive - anything just to get you to agree to let yout CV join the cannon-fodder pile to make it look like they've been productive.

A while ago, when I still had patience for these people, I gave one of them a 'free computer lesson' because he didn't know s*** about the skills the company he was recruiting for was after. All he knew was 'they want Java'. They want Java? What kind? Embedded, Standard, Enterprise, what? This guy didn't know the difference between C++, Java and Perl. I don't expect the average person on the street to know that but when agencies hire IT recruiters they should at least make sure they have a clue!

These agents earn upwards of 30k - not counting commission - that's more than most coders! Companies pay agencies huge fees for these cretins to find their staff. I think it's time agents picked up a book, learnt some s***, earned their salaries and stopped wasting everybody's time!

I'm never getting out of here alive.

UPDATE: Update: got an email from a recruiter this morning, just asking me to SIGN and POST (not just email) a 4 page terms and conditions CONTRACT between them and me! Needless to say, I told them where they could stick their contract.

And relax...

2005-01-19T16:35:00.000Z

After a string of rants, i feel compelled to introduce some fluffyness to calm down....

Awwwww.

...'s just y'know idiots getting me down. Too many stupid people in the world, not enough sniper rifles and tall bell-towers....ahhg the voices... better take my pills again....

'I am the Angle of death, the time of purifcation is at hand' (simpsons)

more cute-ness (found on b3ta).

Another example of government ignorance regarding P2P

2005-01-19T16:04:00.000Z

SB 96 Senate Bill - INTRODUCED: "...any person or entity that sells, advertises, or distributes peer-to-peer file sharing software, as defined, that enables the user to electronically disseminate recordings or audiovisual works over the Internet who fails to exercise reasonable care in preventing use of the software to commit an unlawful act... is punishable by a fine not exceeding $2,500, imprisonment in a county jail for a period not to exceed one year..."

Ah! This is so stupid it hurts my brain to read it!

FACT: P2P typically runs over the protocols UDP and TCP/IP (or rather other protocols like HTTP and Sockets run on top of these) . These are also the main protocols that support networking, hence most of the Internet (a web page is, after all, just a 'file').

FACT: These protocols provide the means to break the law in exactly the same way as the P2P software does, with exactly the same absence of any kind of anti-piracy provision. Is Senator Murray going to try to hold the creators of this software accountable M$, Berkeley, MIT, etc?

Saying P2P should be banned because it's mostly used for piracy is like saying the Internet should be banned entirely at work and in schools because it's mostly used for porn rather than educational/business purposes.

How exactly would one go about adapting the Internet protocols or P2P software to "take due care to prevent piracy" anyway? Sounds like a machine learning problem to me!

They're trying to pass this law to make it illegal to provide technology to people that could be used to commit a crime. Tell you what a**holes: I'll agree to that when you hold people who sell guns and other weapons (including governments) accountable for the atrocities that are committed with them! Not so worried about that sort of accountability are you? Hypocrites.

Article found at Slashdot

Why the world needs the BBC

2005-01-17T15:43:00.000Z

UPDATE: Another example of Fox News rapid-defence of Bush. I wonder why they're so afraid to let people criticise Bush on air?

If it weren't for the BBC, the only kind of media coverage of important events would be by biased right-wing a**holes like Bill O'Reilly - who never even give other people with views different to theirs a chance to explain themselves and offer up a different perspective other than 'America is great and we're always the good guys'.

For example: Transcript of Interview of Jeremy Glick by Bill O'Reilly. You can see the video here. Is that even remotely fair and balanced reporting?

'Sorry people, I wouldn't have invited him on the show if I knew that was what he thought' - unbelievable! He doesn't even try to pretend to be fair and balanced and Fox News has the nerve to criticise the BBC for being biased?

Fox News could learn a thing or two from the BBC about reporting, if they weren't so busy fellating the current administration.

This is what happens when your funding comes directly from advertisers and big corporations who themselves are entirely political and effectively get to censor the news because Fox is worried about one thing: money! Keeping the investors happy! You can't have fair and balanced media with vested interests.

But the BBC doesn't just benefit the UK - it's available world-wide (well, except for China and places like that - and not in the USA if Rupert Murock has his way). Unlike a lot of newspaper sites all over the world -you don't have to pay to view the stories on its website (not directly anyway)!

Some members of the government (particularly those that like white-washes) and the corporate media (Rupert Murdock, mostly) want to destroy the BBC -and they're just looking for an excuse to get rid of this little embarrassment to them.

In 2006 the government will review the 'royal charter' situation. Hopefully better judgment will prevail and we'll get to keep it as it is - I dread to think of the alternative: Fox News? I can almost imagine it. Well groomed, shiny-toothed yapping little lap dogs of big corporations, acting out the news with faked passion and interest like a nightmarish pantomime.

F*** you Rupert Murdock and the horse you rode in on.

Security researcher to be jailed for finding bugs in software?

2005-01-11T08:57:00.000Z

Full story here (found via slashdot).

That is f***ing ridiculous!

"According to Tena's Web site, his research "showed how the program worked, demonstrated a few security flaws and carried out some tests with real viruses. Unlike the advertising claimed, this software didn't detect and stop ‘100 percent of viruses’."

Tena, who is currently a researcher for Harvard University in Massachusetts, said that Tegam responded in a "weird way" by first branding him a terrorist and then filing a formal complaint in Paris. During the resulting tribunal, Tena said the judge decided that because the published exploits included some re-engineered source code from Viguard’s software, he had violated French copyright laws."

This pi**ed me off so much, I decided to write to the company involved and let them know what complete jacka**es this court case is making out of them. I mean, when you make claims like 'stops 100% of viruses' be prepared to be tested and if you only get tested by security professionals -where the worst they ever do is make you red faced- count yourself lucky. Imagine what would have happened if a bank had used your crappy software and a black-hat hackers had got in because of your crappy code?

Why not drop my friends an email here and let them know what people think about this kind of greedy, arrogant behaviour?

UPDATE: searching their news site, I found this page, which would appear to be their defence of their actions. Not much of a defence though, I mean if you're going to accuse people of being one-sided and lying, then at least tell us your side (what your point is) - rather than just bitching like little girls about having your work 'deprecated'.

Idiots.

.

Genius

2005-01-10T17:17:00.000Z

I took one of these spam-vertisement IQ test things -I was bored- anyway... apparently I have an IQ of 136 and I'm a 'Visionary Philosopher' - according to this lot anyway. Is 136 good? Maybe, if it was a proper IQ test. Try it out but only if you're bored silly and need some exercise for your brain.

136? Visionary Philosopher? Pfffft! How come I'm still poor then, eh?

Or maybe 'Visionary Philosopher' is the PC way of saying 'daydreamer'... i.e.:

Fat bastard is to 'gravitationally challenged' as 'Visionary Philosopher' is to
(a) theoretical physicist
(b) astronaut
(c) penniless daydreamer

Send your answers on a postcard to coding_monkey@hotmail.com. Enclose £50 for my exclusive, personalised IQ report. SAMPLE.

F-Wit of the month title awarded to Rush Limbaugh

2004-12-29T17:51:00.000Z

"Top 50% of Wage Earners Pay 96.03% of Income Taxes"

Ah, nothing like a little hate-mongering against the poor is there Rush?

Looking a the same figures he supplied in even increments (rather than using his misleading, increasing sample size), I worked out that the top 5% might be paying 53.25%, but the next 5% are paying 11.64%, the next 15% pay 6% tax per 5% sample size, the next 25% highest earners pay only 2.6% per 5% sample. Rush is just manipulating the display of the figures to make it sound like the middle class are being screwed over by the poor! The question is, why? I think its because conservatives like Rush really dislike the idea of paying taxes to provide services for anyone but themselves, so anything they can do to turn people against the poor and needy is ok in their book and helps people like Bush get elected, who only dump on these people, while giving tax breaks to the extremely rich:

"the bill is heavily tilted toward the upper end of the income scale, with households that make over $1 million a year receiving an average tax cut or $93,500 in 2003, while households in the middle of the income spectrum receive an average tax cut of $217. Some 36 percent of households will receive no tax cut at all; 53 percent will receive $100 or less." source: Center on budget and policy priorities.

"The woman whose child killed classmate Kayla Rolland with an uncle's .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol worked at Dick Clark's American Bandstand Grill in an Auburn Hills mall. Clark is one of the Michigan employers receiving special tax breaks for hiring welfare recipients." source: Bowling for columbine.

Anyway, if his point is that he'd like to pay less tax then he should vote for someone who doesn't go invading other countries and racking up trillion dollar deficits! Who do you think pays for that Rush? Newsflash moron: you do!

If you really want the poor to pay more tax, you could vote to increase funding in schools and fight for state funded health services. Healthy workers tend to work more and be more productive (which helps the economy) and educated people get higher paid jobs - hence they pay more taxes!

Rush definitely gets the f***wit of the month award. What a pathetic, evil little weasel.

A little message to Marketing and PR

2004-12-21T16:06:00.000Z

from Bill Hicks. Bill, you may well be my personal hero.

Kind of makes me wish I had the email address of the old hag that used to do PR/Marketing/Personnel at my old company - what a waste of oxygen she was.

Think how much cheaper stuff would be if we didn't have to pay for all these lousy useless creeps' BMWs and 'lunches with clients'. Hell, maybe we'd even get pay-rises on time. W**kers.

found at Kontraband.com

WEP hacking

2004-12-21T10:53:00.000Z

I knew wireless wasn't that secure, but hacking into a network in a few seconds? Holly crap.

WEP:Dead Again, Part 1

update: part 2 here.

Better try this out at home and see if mine gets cracked that easily.

Article found on Slashdot.

How to really pi** off Micro$oft

2004-12-17T11:44:00.000Z

As most people know, Micro$oft are in a price war with SONY over the Playstation 2, so they actually loose money on the XBox hardware, i.e. they're selling it at a loss. You can pick up an XBox now for around £100. They expect to make their money back on games sales. I say take advantage of this.

Here's an excellent guide to forcing Linux onto your unsuspecting XBox:

"The Xbox is a legacy-free PC by Microsoft that consists of an Intel Celeron 733 MHz CPU, an nVidia GeForce 3MX, 64 MB of RAM, a 8/10 GB hard disk, a DVD drive and 10/100 Ethernet. As on every PC, you can run Linux on it."

Sounds like a good idea to me: having a fully functional, brand-new, decent spec PC - with standardised hardware that actually works properly with the OS software - for around £100? Cool.

I've paid 4/5 times as much for the same hardware and thats usually been reconditioned by some chimp who thinks 'reconditioning' simply meens 're-installing 2000 on it and giving it a quick dust'.

Proof that AOL really is only for dumba55e5

2004-12-16T13:40:00.000Z

What hope has humanity got left when people are this dumb? They'll buy anything that the corporate machine tells them they need. This is why Bush got in for a second term.

"I kind of thought it was like subscribing to the yellow pages," said Lewen. "We kept getting copies of the phone book, so I thought AOL was doing that. I also wanted the virus protection, because it was flu season."

Derp!

(link found on www.fatwillie.net)

Mein Dating Service

2004-12-08T11:11:00.000Z

Remember the good old days of W.W. II when us Europeans were fighting for our very lives, when you actually had to encourage the Yanks to come to war rather than holding them back and Hitler was trying to create his master race of blond-haired, blue-eyed Arians? Well now the American right wing are joining where Hitler left off!

ConservativeMatch.com is a dating site exclusively for the right wing that lets bible-bashing gun-toting rednecks find their perfect match (with an aim to creating the master race). You'll notice of course that it doesn't have a box that lets people look for same-sex relationships, because good conservatives don't go in for all that immoral homosexual non-sense do they? It does however let anyone search for 18 year old schoolgirls called Britney (regardless of your age), so i guess that's ok then. Here's a few examples:

"Well, I grew up with two Republican parents, but I'd like to think I came to my conservative views myself. I live in what I would argue to be the second most liberal city in the country, yet my convictions still hold strong, if not stronger." Tiffany, Mukilteo, WA.

Wow, you sound like a barrel of fun Tiff.

"Well, I'm a God-fearing child, a faithful friend, always smiles even if there's a problem, I'm a choir in our church, an obedient daughter..." 'Love' Cagayan de Oro, PHL.

Did somebody say 'behaviour modifying chip in head'? 'Must think good thoughts... MUST think good thoughts... keep smiling!'

"I am currently a student in... gynaecology because that is my passion... it seems like all I've met here are men incapable of standing firm in an argument." Laura, Fall City, WA

I imagine its hard for a man to argue when you're holding his testicles, but i expect he'd be firm. Maybe this is my match though; Gynaecology is one of my favourite things, more of a hobby than a profession though, strictly speaking.

"I'm an animal lover (especially with dogs, dolphins, and horses)" Tina, Cleveland, Oh.

Eww, is that legal? Maybe in 'Oh'-land.

Anyway... that's not all, you also get access to pro-right propaganda, like: 'Why Liberals STILL Don't Get It'. I particularly like the way the writer 'Ron Marr' (never heard of him) describes Michael Moore as a 'traitorous pig' but fails to explain why and claims that democratic voters consisted entirely of upper class city snobs! He fails to back this ridiculous claim up with any kind of evidence of course; How could he because its completely ridiculous? Each state voted almost 50:50, give or take, so by Ron's logic then, 50% of each state consists of your rich lay-about liberals, while the rest are your working class heroes (and Gynaecologists presumably fall into that category)? Are you telling me that in Texas and Florida 50% of the population are your 'ruling class' elite? Movie producers, lawyers, politicians, oil barons, models, actors and so on? Get f***ing real!

His drivel continues: 'the radical Muslims attacked us...not vice versa'; Yes, they did, not the Iraqis. None of the attackers came from Iraq. The problem is that Ron is too dumb to realise that the world isn't just split into America, her allies and 'Muslim country'. Just because a hand-full of terrorists from one mostly-muslim country attacks on your soil, it doesn't give you the right to lay siege to an totally different country! An entire country! Hell, it doesn't even really give you the right to lay siege to the country they came from!

So how about we start our own 'master race' program and neuter all the dumb people? The quickest way of doing this is to give dumb people a running-kick square in the balls. Lets start with Ron Marr.

Social Engineering

2004-12-02T11:59:00.000Z

What is social engineering?

This is.

Man, people are stupid.

...really, really, amazingly stupid! Wow.

Check out the top 100 IRC quotes... Laughing my a** off.

Games these days....

2004-12-01T17:50:00.000Z

Lets face it, XBOX LIVE Sucks donkey balls (I've got a 500k connection and its still lagging like hell), online multi-player games are slow and jerky and you'll only end up being shouted at by 12 year old american nerds. Most of the games you play are bad ports from the PC, with a few exceptions like Halo.

In fact, games have never been the same since the good old Spectrum days, remember Nebulus? Or for that matter, the early days of the PC weren't bad, Doom kicked ass, it did so much with so little. These days games creaters sacrifice story and playability for the latest geek-pant-wetting top-notch scientifically-acurate-to-12-decimal-places graphical effects that only someone with about £3000 can afford to play becasue that how much the system they're going to need to build will cost! Ok, they look pretty, but if I wanted to just sit there watching cool special effects, I'd sit down to watch the Matrix on DVD... again.... for like, the 1000th time.

Why don't they release these games with options to turn down all the special effects a little, like Unreal did (the first one), so you can just about manage to play it on the average PC?

In the good old days, people did more with less. Are you listening Mr Gates? Your f***ing web browser has a footprint of 23 Meg! 23,000k and what does it do for f*** sake? Display text and graphics and stupid flash adverts!

Every time I can finally afford to buy a new PC and I upgrade all my software versions with the new OS installation, I end up with a PC that does less than the the one I replaced because they've added so much more bloat-ware to the OS, browser and movie players the system actually runs slower!

Time to switch to linux and buy a Playstation or a Gamecube or something...

B***ards.

Another voting farce

2004-11-17T10:37:00.000Z

GeorgeWBush.org Forum -> Voting Machines tied to Cheney & Carlyle Group.

If this is true, it could well be that Bush has done it again and conned his way into the White House. I don't think anyone in their right mind could dispute that he got in by fraud the first time round but I'm keeping an open mind about it this time, having realised just how may Americans are red-neck, right wing, bigoted, bible-bashing gun nuts, like these guys (actually, it seems this site has gone down recently, its was just a bunch of people posting pictures and holding up 'congratulations Bush' signs).

I heard stories of voting machines defaulting to 'Bush' during the vote and people blaming the touch-screen voting errors on people: ABQjournal: Some Early Voters Say Machines Mark Incorrect Choices

"Griffith said she's afraid some votes will go to the wrong candidates by accident. 'People need to know that they have to be careful,' she said. 'I'm concerned that people who don't check and double-check will try to vote for a candidate and not realize that the vote went to another candidate."

Touch-Screen voting. Probably the dumbest idea I've heard of in a long time. I've worked with those things before and they need constant recalibrating. I can't believe they decided to use this stupid system for voting. What the hell is wrong with buttons, computer-readable cards or even good old fashioned pen and ink - remember them? Stupid f***ers.

I think they should bring the UN into America next time, to observe and help the voting process, like they do in unstable African third-world countries where they're holding elections for the first time in decades after ridding themselves of some evil dictator who'd previously gone around killing whole towns for not voting for him. Its the only way to ensure completely fair voting and restore peoples faith in democracy again.

Revenge of the Jedi Goat

2004-11-15T11:06:00.000Z

Only in America.

I was watching TV last night, somewhat hung-over from the all-night fancy dress drink-a-thon birthday party I'd been to the previous night/morning and stumbled across Channel 4's documentary series 'crazy rulers of the world'.

The show was about experiments the US Army did into physic warfare. This started as a sort of 'hippy adventure' of one disillusioned Vietnam general and ended up actually being taken seriously by certain people in high authority.

The hippy general (who I thought sort of looked like an evil version of Mork) gave a report to top-brass which had a cover on it similar to that prog-rock band yes and had badly drawn cartoon pictures inside it of people in crappy futuristic white and silver uniforms holding lambs and wearing speakers that would blast out 'calming music' to the enemy. Brilliant! Imagine being in a trench with bombs blowing up all around you and all of a sudden, some would-be-Abba-tribute-band turns up and starts dancing around with lambs and trying to give you a hug... talk about mind-f***s!. I wouldn't know weather to shoot them or wet my pants laughing.

They started with experiments like trying to stop the heart of a goat using mind power and trying to walk through walls (I was laughing my ass off a that one), they called it 'project jedi'. They also experimented with some practical pressure point self-defense stuff. I don't think there's anything 'magical' about pressure points, but they do work. Remember the feeling when you bang your funny bone on the edge of a table? That's a pressure point. I got punched there once by accident and it ached like hell for about two weeks.

In last nights episode they covered subliminal messages and brainwashing. Apparently the US Army noticed that certain sounds and frequencies could be used to affect the mind! They noticed that a lot of helicopter pilots had crashed in Vietnam for no apparent reason and many of the survivors said they remembered feeling sick and dizzy just before crash-landing. They found the reason was the strobe effect of the sunlight through the blades, which reached a certain frequency and sort of shut-down the brain. The 'non lethal weapons' department is looking into creating a weapon that effects the brain and just shuts you down. Scary stuff.

Since then, the army have been doing some pretty strange things like blaring out relly loud music and bright lights in Waco and throwing Iraqi prisoners into shipping crates and playing 'Barney the dinosaur' to them at high volume, over and over again. At first I thought this was kind of funny, until i saw the pictures of the people really suffering and then I kind of felt a little sick. Just because you don't slap them around and break their toes with hammers like the 'good old days', still doesn't mean you're not being sadistic evil bastards.

But apparently, the guy who stopped the goats heart died of a heart problem some years later, so I guess the goat fought back! I wonder if before it died it said 'If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine! Baa-aaaah'.

Rest in peace, Jedi Goat.

'Positive' discrimination

2004-11-12T10:32:00.000Z

I was watching TV last night, or rather, flipping through the channels with a beer in one hand and the remote in another and a glazed look on my face while I vegged out after a typically crap day at work.

As usual there was nothing worth watching on, but I watched it anyway. I ended up watching half of this documentary about the prison service training new recruits. While the guy in charge was talking about the service he mentioned the issue of 'race relations' and the fact that the prison service had been accused of being 'institutionally racist'.

This confused me a little. Just how can an inanimate object or concept or organisation be racist anyway, surely the people in it have to be racist for this to be true? One of the guard officers said 'that doesn't mean the people in it are racist, but the organisation itself'. This sounds to me like what they really mean is 'there aren't enough ethnic minorities in here' when they accuse an institution of being racist. I call that fascism. So what if they don't have 'enough' ethnic minorities anyway, just how many is enough? Does it matter if they can do the job or not or are the Political Correctness Police only concerned with colour?

In the group of trainees, there was a reasonable selection of ethnicity. Granted most of them were basically Caucasian, but there were some who weren't and were perfectly suited for the job, and luckily enough for the boss, 'ethnically diverse' (he explained he had a quota to meet). What caught my attention though, was the short, fat, slow-witted Indian-mother-of-three.

This woman was pretty much too short and unfit for the job anyway, but she couldn't take orders, couldn't use her radio because she muttered and mispronounced her words and nobody could understand a damn word she was saying and she couldn't work out when to use her radio and what buttons to press. None of the prisoners took any notice of her as she was hardly authoritative and not very good at projecting herself. She was slow and forgetful, unaware, bad at handling people and bad at working in a group, etc. In short, everything a prison guard shouldn't be!

The Superior officer even said 'we couldn't discriminate against her based on height'. That just made my jaw drop. I mean, come on. What's next? We can't discriminate against aircraft pilots that are blind?

Later on, slow-witted Indian mother-of-three actually filed a complaint of bullying against one of her fellow trainees. This got the management worried, would she play the dreaded 'discrimination card'? It was seriously f***ing childish. Anyone training to lock up drug dealers, murderers and terrorists needs to have thicker skin than that. Not that her colleague did anything wrong anyway, she was just stressed out and looking for a scapegoat for her failures.

Everybody (including myself) thought she'd be kicked out but the Boss said that he didn't 'hire and fire', he just made recommendations to 'top brass' and they made the final decisions. We found out at the end of the program that there are actually 'quotas' to be met regarding ethnic minorities and the bosses main criticism of that as well as mine is that it means anyone can become a prison guard if they're the right colour. This isn't any improvement on racism, its just dumb.

There was actually only one person that could dismiss people on the spot, the ex-army self defence tutor. He said that if anyone is unfit, dangerous or basically just 'crap at this', then he'd fail them. Guess who 'just managed to pass'? Yes, slow-witted Indian mother-of-three. Unbelievable.

I just hope they don't start doing this in the Police and the Army. Maybe they do already!

So, my advice to anyone applying for a job in the civil service who's Caucasian and not qualified: on your form where it says 'ethnicity', write down 'Indian'. I'm pretty sure they can't dispute it, because that would probably be considered racist or something! This way, you stand a much better chance of getting the job, (apparantly). So what if you don't look it? Its hard to tell these days anyway, look at Michael Jackson.

.

This Is Bullcrap

2004-11-04T11:19:00.000Z

Well, that's it then. Bugger.

What really made me nauseous during this election was the disgusting way in which the far right were peddaling the line 'a vote for the Democrats is a vote for terrorists'. That's so amazingly stupid it makes me weep. Are you so retarded that you honestly believe that crap?

Its a sad day when Americans can be frightened and fooled by propaganda into voting for Bush. It was close though, which gives me some hope that one day the other half of America will wake up and smell the bull**** these guys are trying to push. I only hope that by then its not too late.

Still, no reason to give up. You still have the right to protest when your government does something stupid in the next four years.

At least there's allways the chance that we'll get rid of Blair over here next May. Hopefully the next PM won't be such a puppet.

Okay, No More Politics

2004-11-02T09:09:00.000Z

At least until after the election....

*holds breath*

...which will probably be in about a months time after all the lawyers have stopped arguing about how many different ways there are to count votes - like last time.

Damn.

Okay.... starting now....!

*holds breath again*

The suspense is killing me.

Crap Towns

2004-10-28T17:43:00.000+01:00

useful tool for getting reviews of towns, at least to know which ones to avoid. I think the review of Aldershot is spot-on. I spent over a year in that place and I'm just glad to have got out alive.

For example: there's a well-known pub with a big gash in the bar where a drug-related chainsaw attack apparently took place.

Can't say I miss renting that room in that house with no door on the toilet or my room that also had scruffy little dogs that shat on the kitchen floor. Ah, those early (penniless) graduation years.

Have Some Fluff

2004-10-28T16:02:00.000+01:00

To balance out the ranting.

Ah, thats better...

Suprisingly calming, good for when work gets you down.

Pure Class.

2004-10-28T11:59:00.000+01:00

Many thanks to shiftCLick on b3ta for finding this awsome clip:

bushuncensored.mov (video/quicktime Object)

Now how many other world leaders flip you off, on camera?

Windows v Linux security: the real facts | The Register

2004-10-26T00:01:00.000+01:00

Windows v Linux security: the real facts | The Register.

Microsoft has made a lot of b******* claims agsint Linux, but here are the facts. See for yourself.

My Top Ten

2004-10-25T17:19:00.000+01:00

So... today I realised that I've been thoroughly pissed off about everything for about the last 5 years or so... give or take.

Why?

Here's a short list of my all-time top ten things that piss me off and increase the likelihood of me going postal sometime in the near future:

Voyeur Reality / Metro-sexual 'comedy'/ fashion/ Decorating TV shows
God there's so much trash on TV these days.

Mothers Against Everything
Or angry pro-censorship right wing 'think of the children' nuts. They even banned 'Punch and Judy' (*) on the sea front in some town down here recently. Personally, I hated that show when I was a kid, but come on, seriously. Where does it end?

People who stand me up for no good reason
Its 5 to 8, I've just stepped out my door and the taxi is waiting and my friend calls to say they can't meet up tonight, because they're tired. Way to go, nothing like leaving it to the last minute is there? Or better yet, I agree to meet up with this girl for drinks one evening, and she reschedules it to be an hour earlier, giving me about 30 mins to get ready, and leg-it across town to the bar. We meet and she tells me that she's got alternative plans for the evening, so she can only fit me in for an hour. F***ing bitch! Thanks for that, I kept my evening free for you and you trade me off against a f***ing Bar-B-Q?!

Bush
A**hole.

Cleaning up other peoples mess
Some of the work I've inherited over the past 6 years has been utter crap. My philosophy is 'do it how you'd like others to do it' (i.e. comment code, document it, explain it etc). The attitude of the contractors we employ seems to be just this: 'scorched earth'; Make it impossible for any party to follow your footsteps, leave no clues. Half the time, the software is full of bugs and doesn't even do what it was supposed to. Yet we keep hiring these people?

The Government
Our British Government. Bunch of overpaid, under-worked, hypocritical a**holes. Education is a mess, the Health service is still a mess, Transport is completely f***ed, we're spending millions on supporting America's war on terror when we should be spending it on pensions, health, education, transport, etc. All the parties are crap, nobody represents my views, all I can do is vote for my next dictator and hope they handle things better than Tony, the grinning t***.

BMW drivers
What are indicators for anyway? Also, all the other idiots who think they own the whole road. You know, the kind of a**hole who'll drive right up your backside while you're doing 40 mph on a winding country lane, then get irritated and overtake you, narrowly missing the oncoming traffic and then cutting you up and nearly causing you to crash into the back of them. Boy racers brown noising and crashing into everything, Old people doing 30 in a 50 and idiot girls using the mirrors for adjusting their makeup rather than for checking for traffic before a maneuver also fall into this category.

Dating
'I like you but I'm off to Greece in three months and I intend to live there forever'
'I just wanted to steal your female friends from you and actually I'm going to live in South America for 6 months'
'You must worship the colour yellow and not step on three consecutive manhole covers in a row' (oh I wish I was making that s*** up).
'Lets be friends'
...etc.
I don't know why, but I attract two kinds of women: the crazy and the migratory. Dating sucks.

My Job
When I'm not rushing around like a blue-arsed fly dealing with angry customers and support people, I'm sat on my numb ass doing nothing in between inane tasks like 'write a little stored procedure to shove this data from here to here', wow, how interesting. The only thing my job challenges is my ever-dwindling patience.

Managerial Bullshit Merchants
'The company can't afford to give you all pay rises this year, but we will be paying the expenses of our 9-5 pen-pushers in London to go out to lunch, dinner and evening parties and get pissed on Champaign and do lines of crack off hookers asses, oh and pay for my BMW, naturally'.

(*) For our American friends: Punch and Judy is a show about Ulrika Johnsen's previous marriage.

The Most Sickening Propoganda

2004-10-25T14:06:00.000+01:00

Ashley's Story (Found this via b3ta).

I just want to say 'Bllllllrggggggguuuururrrggghhhhh... nnnnrrrghhh'...ah that's better /wipes away last stray vomit from lips.

Holy crap. Can you get ANY f***ing lower than that? Using the tragic loss of one child as propoganda for you election campaign. I thought I'd seen sickening propaganda before, but this sets a whole new low.

F***ing increadible.

EDIT: Dick Cheaney's ALIVE! This one's pretty funny.

Who the hell keeps casting Vinny Jones?

2004-10-23T18:20:00.000+01:00

Most people that know me know I have this thing about VJ. I just can't stand the anoying chav. So here's a rant dedicated to the king of 'acting hard'.

I considered linking to a picture of Vinny Jones here but trust me, nobody needs to see that ugly mug. Instead, for those of you (lucky people) who don't know who he is, go see Eurotrip. Its trashy, tacky and pretty much what you'd expect, but it made me laugh anyway and at least you get to see Michelle Trachtenberg in a bikini... nice!

Anyway... what ruins this movie and every single f***ing movie he appears in is that mongoloid w***er Vinny Jones (as the over-irritating British football hooligan),
once again playing the part of himself. Vinny Jones doesn't have any acting talent, at all. I mean none. Whenever he pops up like a cancer on a film he's playing himself, over and over and the same f***ing annoying over-the-top way, constantly trying to assert his manliness and let us all know how super hard he is. I'm guessing he needs to tell everyone how hard he is all the time because really he's a closet cross-dresser. Just my opinion but anyone that finds it necessary to make the world think their hard all the time and is so utterly obsessed with doing so, probably has some serious childhood issues with his mother, if you know what I mean.

Personally, I'd like to kick him square in the balls whilst wearing steal-toe-capped boots - after taking a long run-up. It would be the least he deserves for forcing me to see his ugly face in so many films and adverts.

Stop.... whaCk!.... appearing.... whACK!.... in..... wHACK!.... films... WHACK!

You're on my list f***er.

UPDATE: I knew I'd find you here.

UPDATE (2): Vinnie was voted 64.38% anoying in 2004. Cast your vote for 2005 here.

preparingforemergencies.co.uk

2004-10-22T14:12:00.000+01:00

preparingforemergencies.co.uk

This made me laugh too.

Got to wonder how much the government spent on that stupid leaflet which serves no point at all (other than maybe to scare us into voting for them, like Bush is trying to do). I wonder what the NHS or the education system could have done with that money?

The UK Independence Party

2004-10-22T13:30:00.000+01:00

The UK Independence Party (spoof)

AHHAHAHAHA.... I f***ing love this!

According to B3ta:

Tony Bennett, Research Assistant to Robert
Kilroy-Silk writes:

"I represent Mr Kilroy-Silk and the U.K.
Independence Party. You are advised that your
site will be reported to the Police and we are
currently taking the advice of a libel barrister
as to its contents. I am a Solicitor as well as
a research assistant.

"You may wish to consider removing the site
forthwith."

The Police? Aw get a f***ing life!

Well, as my Grandma allways used to say 'F*** 'em if they can't take a joke' (Kevin Smith)

God I hate Kilroy. Racist, zeonophobic grinning know-it-all.

Gulf War III

2004-10-21T11:30:00.000+01:00

BBC: Iran to hear final nuclear offer
BBC: Q&A

So, looks like we'll be invading Iran next! Bush could probably get away with this because most Americans don't know the difference between Iran and Iraq anyway and get the names confused.

I can see what Iran is trying to do, they're trying to arm themselves sufficiently to defend against the kind of invasion that happened in Iraq (i.e. next door to them). I mean, if the USA can invade any country they feel like these days with any old lame excuse, then if I were them, I'd be worried too. Look at other countries like China and North Korea (and others on the 'Axis of evil' list), You know that there's no way the USA would go anywhere near those countries, because that would just be suicide. They have Nukes and WMDS. We have WMDS, that's what keeps us and them safe from invasion, the threat of retaliation. Can you really blame Iran for wanting that capability, that security? We see them as the big evil, they see us as the big evil and so the psychotic dance continues....

So maybe we should just sell them some nukes?

Then we'd know for sure they had them, we could save millions on the cost of failed weapons inspections and the subsequent mass-invasion. Think about all the lives (coalition troops and innocent Iranian civilians) that would be saved. That would remove the threat of invasion for Iran and make them feel safer and might make them feel less hostile towards the west too. For them it would be one hell of a Xmas present. Nobody shoots at Santa Clause.

Also, it would be sending a positive message to all Muslims out there who are so permanently p***ed off at how we support Israel and arm them with weapons all the time. It would help to build some bridges and maybe dissuade a few more Muslims from becoming terrorists.

Ok, Israel would have kittens when they found out, so what? They have nukes too. There's just no way that Iran would ever use them because they know for sure that the USA, UK, Israel and various others would nuke them right back (and have the perfect justification for doing so)!

What's the alternative? Threaten, investigate, invade? Just like Iraq... and didn't that work out well!

Sign the petition against software patents

2004-10-15T23:14:00.000+01:00

Software should be protected by copywrite, not patent laws! Patenting methods in software development can be a lot like patenting the cog or even the wheel, in short, a f***ing stupid idea! Its unjustified and a serious hindrance to us developers who are just trying to get our job done.

Patent laws came into existence for protecting inventions (physical devices) not ideas! Ideas are too broad a thing to cover. This article explains it better (see the 'mousetrap analogy').

Yet another example of legislative crap the USA legal system (or rather the big greedy corporations that control it) is trying to force down our European necks is the enforcement of software patents created in the USA, in Europe. Stop them! Show them they don't own the whole world and sign the petition now!

Gay Bar!

2004-10-15T16:15:00.000+01:00

This is a bit special.

Love the way Bush seems to be wording 'lets start a war'. Fantastic.

Do any kids still speak English?

2004-10-08T15:35:00.000+01:00

Browse through any blogger-type site and you'll find hundred of pages of drivel written by teenagers, much of which will follow the same pattern as this fine example:

"hmm 1week le... nvr update blog... hmmm exam already wahz... so fast... hmmm yesterdae mornin needa take 2 exam paper...wAhz strEss... hmmm...den after tat ... hmmm actually wanna go eat lunch wif thongEe dey all de but i already ask darl wait 4 me at e porch dere le so cannot go eat lunch wif dem...hmmm... "

....it goes on and on like that. Ignore the fact the these logs are full of stories about what they had for lunch, or the fact that they've run out of 'sunny D' in the fridge. I'm horrified by the abuse of the English language. Does anyone learn grammar anymore, or spelling? Now, I know I can't spell and my grammar probably sucks but I was raised to take pride in our language and do your best to write good clean English, because otherwise you just sound like kind of a dick.

Why the hell is everyone writing everything in 'sms' all the time?

c u l8r muva fkr

The next person that writes something like that to me in an email, gets shot.

and..... what's ....with ...all ....the ....pauses?

I think the mighty Maddox puts it best when he says 'Wireless internet may very well destroy our chances of contacting intelligent life.' Damn straight. Its more likely to make them want to come over with a load of battleships and wipe out the human race, simply for being too god-damn anoying! Personally, I think we'd deserve it.

keep 'em fearin'

2004-10-08T12:03:00.000+01:00

bull**** in fast foward.

Culture Of Denial

2004-10-08T09:40:00.000+01:00

We're sorry, our bad. Seems like our intelligence was complete bull****. Yeah, right, blame it on MI6, even though Tony Blair told them what to say in the report and how to say it.

How come its the Trade and Industry Secretary appologising first, how about a proper apology from the big man himself? Otherwise, it really doesn't seem like a proper apology to me, more like the wishful thinking of one minister. I doubt very much that Tony is sorry, I bet in his big fat head he's still thinking 'well, I did it for the good of the people, you can't always be popular and do the right thing'. Ahhhg. We need more frequent elections!

Why is it these days that we have a culture of denial, where nobody is ever willing to be held accountable, even when there is irrefutable evidence? Why is it that when they finally do apologise, its indirect? You get a letter or some secretary tells you.

Its the same with companies and I see it all the time. Something goes wrong at work, I get yelled at down the phone from the support monkeys, (usually Friday at around 5pm is when they like to log a problem with me, especially ones that have been going on for days). I then spend hours looking into it, checking all the systems and find out that the problem lies at their end. I hear a few days later that they've finally accepted that but I never get any kind of apology from anyone, ever. These idiots will do all sorts of things, like changing network card settings and assigning multiple computers the same IP address, and yet the first thing they blame when there's a fault is the software.

Shove your apology... Sideways.

Good or Evil?

2004-10-07T11:52:00.000+01:00

...can't help feeling a little dissapointed actually.

UPDATE:

Yeahhhh alright! Thats more like it, lets see how high I can get it.

Peasant Scum

2004-10-05T13:22:00.000+01:00

Oh, I f***ing hate Chavs.

I hate 'em, I wanna kick 'em in the nuts!
Sqwar in the nuuuts!

Worthless designer T-shirt'-wearing goldchain coverting scum, driving around town at twice the speed limit while using their mobile and pumping out the brown noise from their stupid cheap crappy cars which they've spent all of their Mum's dole money on and drilled holes in the engine and exhaust so it makes even more noise in the hope that people will think they've really got some super 'monster truck' engine under there instead of the 10cc 2hp smelly piece of crap that they bought second hand of their mate 'Dez'. Ahhhgggg! Listen you stupid, uneducated fools, nobody gives a f*** about the engine in your crappy rust-bucket car, get some motor insurance, learn to drive, read a f***ing book and get a job!

I resent that my taxes pay for these f***ers dole money.

Rumsfeld questions Saddam-Bin Laden link

2004-10-05T12:29:00.000+01:00

Well there you go...

No Saddam-Bin Laden link

..in the words of the great war-chief himself.

So lets sum the war effort up so far:

Pros
* Before the war, anyone in Iraq who spoke out against Saddam would be tortured and killed. Now people are killed indescriminantly and those supporting Sadam that are captured alive are tortuered by dumb red-necks on prison gaurd duty in 'detainment centers' (which isn't the same thing as 'concentration camps', oh no), but at least its only a 'small minority'.
* Saddam was a very nasty man (who the USA put there in the first place, BTW). Now the people have a much nicer unelected political puppet to control them.
* Ok, Saddam wasn't the only evil dictator in the world, arguably he's a B-list dictator, but hey, you have to start somewhere, right W? I meen those South African dictators don't have any oil, do they?
* Incidentally.... Iraq has a shed-load of oil!
* After we've 'installed democracy' in Iraq, everyone can buy Maccy D's and Starbuck's coffee and wear Nike trainers.

Cons
* No WMDs found
* No indications of an on-going WMD programme
* No links to terrorists found
* Iraq is now less stable and even more dangerous than it was under Saddam (more civilians and soldiers dying).
* We have alienated the populace against us.
* Nobdy trusts America or the UK anymore and we have dragged our good name through the mud.

Who's going to free us from our dicatorial regiem? That what I want to know.

Terrorise this!

A strong argument

2004-10-01T15:40:00.000+01:00

"No John Kerry"

Riiiiiiight....

... why exactly? What's your friggin' point?

Seriously, nobody here in the UK can figure out why the hell anyone would vote for Bush. The guys a complete f***ing moron, there's just no justification for it. So what if you're a republican by birth, you don't have to vote for him, that's would be like Germans in WWII saying 'well I'm German, so I support Hitler and everything he does'. The Nazi's where big on 'homeland security' as well you know.

A plank of wood would be better than Bush for president and probably more useful. I mean, you could nail it to the wall and use it as a shelf for all those bottles of Jack Daniels Bush likes to keep handy in the Whitehouse, whereas Bush himself is no f***ing use to anyone. Well, that's not quite true, I'm sure the big oil corporations find him to be a useful little puppet every now and then.

Why is this such a difficult choice for you guys?

I try and keep an open mind about most people, but this is one dumb-ass I just can't tolerate.

Seriously, you guys better get your fat ass off that couch and vote that dick out of office, or the world is totally f***ed.

God help us all..... !

Slashdot | First JPEG Virus Posted To Usenet

2004-09-28T11:53:00.000+01:00

Oh holly crap. Now they're exploiting JPEG decoders to spread viruses/worms/trojans! It also looks like you could do this with various other types of file too. Linux could also be at risk (makes sense, if you run it on IBM compatable). Better check you've got the latest version of Firefox.

Slashdot: Questions for Bush and Kerry

2004-09-28T11:23:00.000+01:00

Here's mine: Help Select Questions for Bush and Kerry

Pork chop sandwiches!

2004-09-27T11:47:00.000+01:00

FENSLERFILM, creators of the Public Service Announcements (re-dubbed comedy versions of the end of G.I.Joe cartoons), have been issued with a letter telling them to take down the PSA content because it 'violates copywrite'. That's bull. They're not profiting from this and its clearly meant as a joke. If they just put up a disclaimer or something, that should be enough. I guess big smelly corporate guys just don't have any sense of humor.

I'm sure you can still find them out there somewhere, maybe on peer-to-peer. Once its out there, you can't get rid of it.

UPDATE: you can still see a couple on www.heavy.com.

The F-Wit of the week award

2004-09-23T16:06:00.000+01:00

...Goes to Micro$oft, for deciding to only provide IE patches for XP. Nice going guys, way to ensure even more people dump your crappy bug-ridden, insecure, anti-privacy browser in favor of Mozzila or Firefox. I only wish it wasn't welded to your crappy OS, so I could ditch that crap forever. Unfortunately at work, some of the intranet apps will only work properly on IE, so I guess we'll just have to either re-write them or put up with the security loopholes.

Fantastic.

I'm just waiting for them to say they're no longer going to do security updates for the windows 2000 OS.

Morning has broken, like the 1st Amendment

2004-09-23T13:03:00.000+01:00

Cat Stevens was refused entry into the USA on security grounds.

Presumably because:
" In the late 1980s he shocked many of his former fans by supporting the fatwa ordered by the Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, which led to him being put under a death sentence by the Iranian government.

And in 2000 he was deported from Israel over allegations that he backed the militant Islamic group Hamas. "

But the real question is, is he actually guilty of aiding and abetting terrorists? Because if he wasn't then according to the 1st amendment (freedom of speech) there's no reason why he shouldn't be let into the country. Tailed, spyed on, bugged and recorded, protested against, maybe even egged by protesters, but not refused entry. I mean, come on.

Ok, he's an a**hole for supporting the fatwa. That's my opinion. But opinions don't meen aiding and abetting illegal action. Not unless you offer some sort of help in some way, like cash.

If he offered any help or cash, then fair enough, but it looks like they just kicked him out of their country for having an opinion they didn't like!

So much for the 'land of the free'.

President Bush Discusses Iraq

2004-09-19T18:01:00.000+01:00

President Bush Discusses Iraq in his usual incoherant way. First he butchers innocent civialians, then he butchers my language.

Learn to speak English properly! Its not like you can't aford the lessons. Hint: 'sewicided' isn't a real word!

"if we see a threat, we must deal with it before it fully materializes"

Really Mr Bush?

Russia was 'a threat'. They had WMDs comming out of their ears, but I didn't notice the USA rushing in there with tanks and troups. Of course that was before you stole the presedancy. Your predecessors delt with 'threats' rather differently, and it seems they resolved that conflict (the cold war) with significantly less bloodshed.

Why can't you?

Winy little bitches against freedom of speech

2004-09-17T11:03:00.000+01:00

Mothers against Maddox. What next? For those of you living in a cave for the last three years, here is the 'best site in the universe'. Ok, some of this content might not be suitable for kids, but that's not his problem.

Quite frankly, letting your kids use the internet without some sort of supervision is like giving them their pocket money and sending them alone into the New York ghettos: insane (it'd be about five minutes before they would be robbed and/or killed, raped or at least buying porn and cigarettes).

Bet you any money this 'mother against Maddox' is divorced. I feel sorry for those kids.

As for WEBSENSE Enterprise blocking access to this site: why the hell do people care so much about this site being visited at work? If employees want to take a break and read a funny website, what the hell is the problem with that? Just because its not YOUR opinion and you think 'irony' is a kind of metal! A lot of people's jobs with computers are so damn boring that a little surfing here and there can help improve moral and so improve productivity. But no, you have to play Big Brother.

Fascists.

Update: Some amusing google searches that came up for 'Mothers Against'
Mothers Against Boomerangs! Heh.
Mothers Against Peeing Standing Up. WTF? Way too much free time on their hands. Get a job.... and a life!
Mothers Against Crappy Backgrounds. I actually agree with this one.
Mothers Against Video Game Addiction and Violence. Another typical bunch of ignorant, puritan, irresponsible a**holes who blame all their kids problems on TV and video games instead of actually taking responsibility for their kids themselves and raising them properly.

'War on terror' simulator

2004-09-16T14:51:00.000+01:00

Interesting simulation. You bomb a civilian by mistake and it makes other civialians terrorists. Kind of like 'sim city' for Bush.

Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit

2004-09-14T21:34:00.000+01:00

Very good article on Buffer Overflows.

The moral of this story: C is a dangerous choice of language for communications software.

Man, I'd love to get my hands on the source code for windows and do a few searches.

Who is the RIAA and why are they total scum?

2004-09-14T21:17:00.000+01:00

Downhill Battle Peer-to-Peer Legal Defense Fund

"The Recording Industry of America (RIAA) is the lobbying organization for the five major record labels, which hold a monopoly on the American music business. These corporations--EMI, Sony, AOL Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and Vivendi Universal--use the RIAA to illegally fix prices on CDs and now are using the RIAA to spy on people's home computers and then file lawsuits against them."

These greedy bastards would also like to make it illegal to even provide a p2p service:

"Courts so far have held that networks cannot be held liable because, like VCR makers, they do not commit copyright infringement but merely make it possible.

The RIAA has pushed Congress to lower that standard. A bill currently being considered in the Senate would hold liable anyone who "induces" others to reproduce copyrighted material. "

Internet Radio: Trance/Dance etc.

2004-09-13T11:13:00.000+01:00

Digitally Imported Good tunes, especially for getting 'in the zone' when you're coding.

Tactics Arena Online

2004-09-09T15:45:00.000+01:00

Cool game. Very well put together, especially considering its free to play!

'Free speech' and the P.A.T.R.I.O.T act

2004-08-27T13:51:00.000+01:00

I was listening to Bin Rev Radio and they brought up this article, related to the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act:

NY Times: Computer Student on Trial for Aid to Muslim Web Sites

They're actually trying to take this guy to court because he provided a server for discussion? Is this for real? Aparantly this was in the NY Times. If anyone knows how this turned out or has any more info, please let me know. I meen if the FBI have some sort of secret file on this guy proving he's done something really wrong, then they should tell us, but last time I checked, free speech wasn't a crime in the USA.

I find this ironic considering the America's track record for supporting dictators and terrorists, like the IRA, for instance. The government didn't do anything about that for ages, and that was people collecting cold hard cash! Not providing a web server.

Can't find any real terrorists eh? No problem, just pick on the little guy.

Don't they realise that by acting like this and turning the country into a panic-ridden police state, the terrorists get what they want (i.e. terror)?

The village idiot

2004-08-25T13:02:00.000+01:00

MilkandCookies - Bush on Sovereignty

Good enough for government work

2004-08-25T11:56:00.000+01:00

Looking for work?

Can't speak a word of English?

Don't have any qualifications?

Maybe YOU should consider a carear as a SOFTWARE CONTRACTOR!

TTTTttt--ching!

(Monkey walks away muttering under his breath after a bad day at work)

In case of Armageddon, stop drop and roll

2004-08-20T17:31:00.000+01:00

I got this junk mail from the government. At first I was kind of worried seeing something was being sent from the government to me, because I thought 'oh hell, this is it, self-assessment', but it was actually a glossey 20 page government information leaflet about 'what to do in the event of a terrorist attack'. What the hell kind of world are we living in today?

It could be YOU! Muhhhhhaahahaha....

Yeah, thanks for that a**holes, way to chear up my day.

So I flipped through this thing and basically it said if you're lucky enough to survive a terrorist attack, stay home and listen to the tv and radio for anouncements, oh, and its always handy to have bottled evian stored away, just in case you can't rely on the water supply any more.

Talk about signs of the Apocalipse. Stop the world, I want to get off.

South Park

2004-08-19T21:04:00.000+01:00

This site is hella cool.

Bush lovers

2004-08-19T14:52:00.000+01:00

I was browsing through the blogs by clicking on the 'next blog' button and I found one of these extreem right wing blogs by someone who thinks the sun shines out of Bush's behind and that everyone who votes for anyone other than Bush is a terroist sympathiser.... seriously, thats what he implied. Its depressing how dumb people can be. It scares me how much people believe the news and what politicians say.

Made me think about how people stick to their parties in the US like glue and all I want to say is this: whatever your political inclination, allways judge someone by what they do, not what they say. I meen, if they say they support your views, but then go ahead and screw you, your country and every other country they have dealings with, do you really want to vote them back into power, just because they're 'fighting the war against terror' (tm)?

First post

2004-08-19T13:54:00.000+01:00

Interesting link I found recently about hacking:

www.binrev.com

Good links section to other sites, security bulletins, etc.